Top 350 Arundhati Roy Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.”

— Arundhati Roy

102. “It is after all so easy to shatter a story. To break a chain of thought. To ruin a fragment of a dream being carried around carefully like a piece of porcelain.”

— Arundhati Roy

103. “Somewhere along the way, Capitalism reduced the idea of justice to mean just “human rights,” and the idea of dreaming of equality became blasphemous. We are not fighting to tinker with reforming a system that needs to be replaced.”

— Arundhati Roy

104. “So here we have it. The equivocating distinction between civilisation and savagery, between the “massacre of innocent people” or, if you like, “a clash of civilisations” and “collateral damage”. The sophistry and fastidious algebra of infinite justice.”

— Arundhati Roy

105. “It was herself she was exhausted by. She had lost the ability to keep her discrete worlds discrete – a skill that many consider to be the cornerstone of sanity. The traffic inside her head seemed to have stopped believing in traffic lights. The result was incessant noise, a few bad crashes and eventually gridlock.”

— Arundhati Roy

106. “And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.”

— Arundhati Roy

107. “With Partition, in 1947, Roy writes, “God’s carotid burst open on the new border between India and Pakistan and a million people died of hatred. Neighbours turned on each other as though they’d never known each other, never been to each other’s weddings, never sung each other’s songs.” The consequences of that terrible event form the main story of “The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.”

— Arundhati Roy

108. “By the time they got back, the lights were all out and everybody was asleep. Everybody, that is, except for Guih Kyom the dung beetle. He was wide awake and on duty, lying on his back with his legs in the air to save the world in case the heavens fell.”

— Arundhati Roy

109. “I think it is dangerous to confuse the idea of democracy with elections. Just because you have elections doesn’t mean you’re a democratic country. They’re a very vitally important part of a democracy. But there are other things that ought to function as checks and balances. If elections are the only thing that matter, then people are going to resort to anything to win that election.”

— Arundhati Roy

110. “Let’s leave one alive so that it can be lonely.”

— Arundhati Roy

111. “And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. A war that we have both won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

— Arundhati Roy

112. “Do you make all your life’s big decisions based on mobile phone videos?”

— Arundhati Roy

113. “Coercing a woman out of a burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.”

— Arundhati Roy

114. “A war that we have won and lost. The very worst sort of war. A war that captures dreams and re-dreams them. A war that has made us adore our conquerors and despise ourselves.”

— Arundhati Roy

115. “When you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many US citizens want to. I don’t think that all of them necessarily are co-conspirators in this concept of empire. And those who are not, need to listen to other stories in the world – other voices, other people.”

— Arundhati Roy

116. “People who promote the free market and growth are far more romantic, and far more ideologically driven and blinded by their vision than somebody who goes in and comments about the beauty of a forest or the stars in the sky.”

— Arundhati Roy

117. “She woke to the sound of his heart knocking against his chest. As though it was searching for a way out.”

— Arundhati Roy

118. “Speaking for myself, I am no flag waver, no patriot, and I am fully aware that venality, brutality, and hypocrisy are imprinted on the leaden soul of every state. But when a country ceases to be merely a country and becomes an empire, then the scale of operations changes dramatically. So may I clarify that tonight I speak as a subject of the American empire? I speak as a slave who presumes to criticize her king.”

— Arundhati Roy

119. “The fact is that America’s weapons systems have made it impossible for anybody to confront it militarily. So, all you have is your wits and your cunning, and your ability to fight in the way the Iraqis are fighting.”

— Arundhati Roy

120. “Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.”

— Arundhati Roy

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

121. “Have we raised the threshold of horror so high that nothing short of a nuclear strike qualifies as a ‘real’ war? Are we to spend the rest of our lives in this state of high alert with guns pointed at each other’s heads and fingers trembling on the trigger?”

— Arundhati Roy

122. “Nilekani’s technocratic obsession with gathering data is consistent with that of Bill Gates, as though lack of information is what is causing world hunger.”

— Arundhati Roy

123. “You begin to realize that hypocrisy is not a terrible thing when you see what overt fascism is compared to sort of covert, you know, communal politics which the Congress has never been shy of indulging in.”

— Arundhati Roy

124. “There’s no division on my bookshelf between fiction and nonfiction. As far as I’m concerned, fiction is about the truth.”

— Arundhati Roy

125. “Once you understand the process of corporate globalization, you have to see that what happened in Argentina, the devastation of Argentina by the IMF, is part of the same machine that is destroying Iraq. Both are efforts to break open and to control markets. And so Argentina is destroyed by the chequebook, and Iraq is destroyed by the cruise missile. If the chequebook won’t work, the cruise missile will. Hell hath no fury like a market scorned.”

— Arundhati Roy

126. “The Believers come with their guns, their prayer beads and their own Destroy-Yourselves Manual.”

— Arundhati Roy

127. “The people who created the crisis will not be the ones that come up with a solution.”

— Arundhati Roy

128. “Now we’re in a situation where democracy has been taken into the workshop and fixed, remodelled to be market friendly. So now the United States is fighting wars to install democracies. First is was topple them, now it’s install them. And the whole rise of corporate-funded NGOs in the modern world, this notion of CSR, corporate social responsibility – it’s all part of a New Managed Democracy. In a sense, it’s all part of the same machine.”

— Arundhati Roy

129. “As a writer, one spends a lifetime journeying into the heart of language, trying to minimize, if not eliminate, the distance between language and thought.”

— Arundhati Roy

130. “The American people ought to know that it is not them, but their government’s policies, that are so hated.”

— Arundhati Roy

131. “Destroying us. You are constructing us. It’s yourselves that you are destroying.”

— Arundhati Roy

132. “The tired wisdom of knowing that what goes around eventually comes around.”

— Arundhati Roy

133. “Acceptance spells death to a writer.”

— Arundhati Roy

134. “Having wounded each other thus, deeply, almost mortally, the two sat quietly side by side on someone’s sunny grave, haemorrhaging.”

— Arundhati Roy

135. “We’re told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.”

— Arundhati Roy

136. “Ironically, the era of the free market has led to the most successful secessionist struggle ever waged in India – the secession of the middle and upper classes to a country of their own, somewhere up in the stratosphere where they merge with the rest of the world’s elite. This Kingdom in the Sky is a complete universe in itself, hermetically sealed from the rest of India. It has its own newspapers, films, television programmes, morality plays, transport systems, malls, and intellectuals.”

— Arundhati Roy

137. “The only thing worth globalizing is dissent.”

— Arundhati Roy

138. “She wore flowers in her hair and carried magic secrets in her eyes.”

— Arundhati Roy

139. “In Kashmir when we wake up and say “Good Morning” what we really mean is “Good Mourning.”

— Arundhati Roy

140. “He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.”

— Arundhati Roy

141. “Globalization means standardization. The very rich and the very poor must want the same things, but only the rich can have them.”

— Arundhati Roy

142. “Being with him made her feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country into the vast, extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before them like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.”

— Arundhati Roy

143. “It is curious how sometimes the memory of death lives on for so much longer than the memory of the life that is purloined.”

— Arundhati Roy

144. “There are things that you can’t do – like writing letters to a part of yourself. To your feet or hair. Or heart.”

— Arundhati Roy

145. “Hide!′ she whispered. ‘The vegetarians are coming.”

— Arundhati Roy

146. “Who can know from the word goodbye what kind of parting is in store for us.”

— Arundhati Roy

147. “When she looked at him now, she couldn’t help thinking that the man he had become bore so little resemblance to the boy he had been. His smile was the only piece of baggage he had carried with him from boyhood into manhood.”

— Arundhati Roy

148. “Rahel drifted into marriage like a passenger drifts towards an unoccupied chair in an airport lounge.”

— Arundhati Roy

149. “It was the kind of time in the life of a family when something happens to nudge its hidden morality from its resting place and make it bubble to the surface and float for a while. In clear view. For everyone to see.”

— Arundhati Roy

150. “Heaven opened and the water hammered down, reviving the reluctant old well, greenmossing the pigless pigsty, carpet bombing still, tea-colored puddles the way memory bombs still, tea-colored minds.”

— Arundhati Roy